


Life After Cable News

by JayTDawgzone9999



Category: Dr. STONE (Anime), Dr. STONE (Manga)
Genre: Cabbages, Crack, Don't Examine This Too Closely, Don't ask why the cabbage man got unpetrified, F/M, Mild Blood, Minor Violence, Surreal, Weed, Weed Smoking, cabbage, don't take this seriously, my brain does its own thing, or why he even exists in the world of dr. stone, trebuchets, tripping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-13
Updated: 2019-11-13
Packaged: 2021-01-29 20:36:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21416302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayTDawgzone9999/pseuds/JayTDawgzone9999
Summary: Not all news is suitable for broadcasting on live television, especially when there are no more tv's, but one determined reporter vows to do her job no matter what stands in her way.Or: A reporter continues doing her job despite getting abruptly thrust into the stone age because there are more compelling reasons to do things than logic.
Relationships: Shishiou Tsukasa/Minami Hokutozai
Kudos: 3





	Life After Cable News

**Author's Note:**

> Hide your wife, hide your kids, hide your husbands because I have no idea what happened and I'm not about to try explaining it because words can only describe so much. Also featuring a cameo by the Cabbage Man in Avatar for absolutely no reason at all.

Somewhere in Tokyo, Japan, a woman walked into her house after a long day of work. It was already dark outside since, for some reason, the Japanese government decided to adopt the cursed American concept of daylight savings time and every November, the clock went back one hour, causing the sky to darken that much earlier. 

The woman, clutching her keys in one hand and the strap of her purse in the other, locked the door behind her, and after hearing the familiar click that let her know the door had been locked, she dropped her keys and purse on the table and walked over to her couch. Though she looked out the window with a certain feeling of sadness dwelling in her heart, she knew that there was no choice but to accept reality (or modern capitalism, at least) for what it was. 

"It's just as dark as when I left." she moaned, noticing the setting sun for a moment before lying face-first on her old couch,still wearing her stylish dress, warm fake-fur trimmed jacket, and platform high heels because as much as she hated being a slave to the forty hour work week, she still wanted to look good doing it. Now oblivious to the outside world, she failed to notice the strange flash of green light in the sky covered the planet in mere seconds, too busy bemoaning the fact that she was chained to the bleak reality of having to work 40 hours a week in order to survive.

"What are you talking about?" A tall, muscular man that wore his long dark hair in 5 low ponytails asked her when she felt someone pouring something cold and wet that was, upon further inspection, not water, onto her head. 

"Huh? Who are-" when she was finally able to move again (funny, she thought, as she didn't remember why she felt so stiff for a second there,) she looked up only to be greeted by a familiar face with equally familiar brown eyes. 

"Take this, it's not much but it should be enough to cover you." he replied, handing her something that could be worn as simple dress. "I-" 

"Hey, Tsukasa." some random person she couldn't identify in a police lineup asked him after she put on the dress. "Why is that chick's nose bleeding?" 

Tsukasa turned towards the man, smacking him with the blunt end of some kind of primitive looking sword without so much as a moment's hesitation. 

"God, some people are so rude." Tsukasa remarked as the man lied unconscious on the ground, sheathing his improvised stone weapon back wherever it came from. "Interrupting people when they're talking is such a rude thing to do." 

When Tsukasa was done, he turned back to the woman he had just revived, ignoring the man on the ground who was still not moving. "Anyways, the important thing is that one, if you ever see or hear anything interesting, let me know and two, if you want to stay here, you'll never have to pay rent or taxes ever again." he told her, kneeling down and holding her face in one of his hands while he held a small piece of cloth to her nose to stop the bleeding. 

"Um, I-" Having him hold her face so closely to his short-circuited her higher level thinking and judgment skills in 3 seconds flat and also it was hard to talk with something pressed against her nose, but no sooner did she try to start responding did he remove the cloth, as her bleeding had stopped and she found it easy to breathe again. 

"So, um, I just have to be on the lookout for anything unusual happening and report anything important I see or hear back to you, and I can live here with you?" she asked, her heart racing a mile a minute. 

Though his neutral facial expression remained unchanged, she noticed he was still holding her face in his hand-not fair at all, she though, not that she was complaining, but she had to know. Until that strange night where she passed out after work and woke up in this strange new world, reporting the news had been her main talent, and as there was really nowhere else for her to go or any way for her to survive on her own in a world that seemed to lack electricity, plumbing, and all the other fixings of modern life, a chance to continue doing what she was familiar with was nothing short of the best option available. 

"Exactly." he responded. "Any questions?" 

Uh-

How to broach it delicately was the real question, but nevertheless she had no choice, forcing the words out with nothing but sheer willpower. 

"Why are you kneeling so close to me?" 

Tsukasa remained silent for a moment, his expression revealing that he had long since forgotten what he was doing and when the realization hit him, it was all but painted on his face. 

"You don't have to move away." 

"No, it's fine, I have nothing else important to say right now." he said when he stood up in the blink of an eye. "I'll let you know if I have to tell you anything else. In the meantime, just do whatever you want." he said, dashing off before she could respond. 

"I wonder if he's single." she thought while fixing her makeshift dress. 

_________

"Ahh...he hasn't talked to me in 5 days now....I wonder if I did something to piss him off....maybe he hates me...." Minami asked herself, hiding in a hole inside a large tree while people were screaming and yelling and bombs, grenades, and fireworks going off every now and then. "Please tell me he doesn't hate me...." 

There was also a trebuchet that just showed up one day, which nobody could explain, as they had all been too afraid to get too close to it given what happened in the flying rock incident of year 5740. Oh well, some things were out of her pay-grade after all, and unlike her shitty old boss and her shitty old landlord and the shitty old president of the homeowner's association, Tsukasa didn't care about money or property values or maintaining the image of being a perfect, civic-minded tax-paying citizen and also he was extremely hot. 

"It's the motherfucking science kingdom again, give those bitches a taste of their own medicine!" some random guy yelled after someone yelled "vibe check!" and smashed a bottle of twenty-fourth rate stone age champagne over someone else's head, knocking them out instantly. 

A strange cloud of white smoke filled the air way off in the distance, far enough away that Minami couldn't see who (or perhaps what) started it. 

"Oh no, a fire, I better run and tell Tsukasa!" she thought. "But I'm still scared...." she paused a moment, gripping some of the fabric of her dress as she balled up her hand into a fist. "Okay, remember, deep breaths, this isn't the time to panic...." She inhaled on a count of four, held her breath for seven seconds, and exhaled on a count of eight. "See, just like that." she encouraged herself. "There's nothing to panic about. I'm sure Tsukasa and the men fighting out there will get it all under control somehow...." 

Minami covered her ears when someone yelled something about the trebuchet again and there was some kind of ominous noise that didn't sound like it came from anything human, animal, or anything in between. 

"Ahh, this is terrible. I just wish-" 

No, she thought, willing herself to concentrate and focus without getting too panicky about the situation at hand. Don't think about Tsukasa fishing in the ocean wearing nothing at all, she scolded herself, or Tsukasa taking out his weird little ponytails to let his hair down loose, or how his makeshift robe showed some of his broad, muscular chest, or his back muscles flexing when he chopped down a tree with a single swing of an axe, or how nice it would feel to rest her head on that perfectly sculpted chest of his, and run her hand down the firm muscles right below until-

"Ahh, my testicles! Fuck that bok choy bastard and his meddling little friends, I swear I'll blow them up to hell in a handbasket-" 

Another scream from yet another random man violated her ears and it was at that moment that Minami, now realizing that the ominous trebuchet was gone, decided it was now or never. The trebuchet was just a machine, she knew, but for reasons no one could explain, sometimes it watched them, watched them in the night, staring though it had no eyes, it knew-it knew everything that went on in the Empire of Might since its mysterious arrival-

It was gone now, that was the important thing (besides the Kingdom of Science attacking yet again and a bunch of people dying, of course,) and with all the determination she could muster, she ran as fast as her legs would carry her (faster now than before since there were no platform heels in the stone age,) determined to find the only man she ever wanted to work for ever again. He couldn't have gone far, she thought, running on and on despite her anxiety gnawing away at her like a fat dog having a go at a plump juicy steak. 

"If he's not fighting, he would be here." she thought, reaching the small cave he kicked his feet back in more than anywhere else, though she didn't see any sign of him. 

"Dammit, this isn't good." she thought when she saw a huge man pick up a skinny guy with hair that looked like a leafy green vegetable and toss him over a cliff. "I've gotta find Tsukasa-I know he's still alive, he would never die that easily." she thought, picking up the pace again as she left the cave, running until she tripped over a rock, landing face first into the most wonderful pillow she could ever imagine resting her head on. 

"You should be more careful, if you fall and cut yourself on something, the wound might get infected and you could die." Tsukasa told her after removing her now beet-red face from his wonderfully firm, muscular chest, holding her by the shoulders to look her right in the eye.

Oh God, she thought, eye contact with Tsukasa being her one main weakness. "I'm sorry, I was just-I was just running to tell you about the trebuchet-it's just gone, and I didn't even see anyone take it, it just disappeared like that-" 

"Shh, it's okay, there's nothing to worry about." he told her, pulling her closer. "Well,-no, I'll deal with that." he interrupted himself when someone blew up a cart and someone else yelled "My cabbages!" 

"Cabbages?" she replied, her morbid curiosity sparked by the two words yelled in complete and utter anguish like nothing she had ever heard before in all her career as a news reporter. 

"Don't worry about it." he reassured her, stroking the side of her face with one hand. "Despite heavy losses, we defeated the Kingdom of Science, so I figure a victory celebration is in order."

His hands, which were roughly large enough to wrap around her neck to choke her and still have room left over, if she fantasized about it, which she unfortunately found herself doing more than she wanted to admit, were rough and calloused but oddly warm, a sensation that was odd yet comforting and something completely unexpected. How mysterious, she thought. Tsukasa was nothing if not hard to read, but it was easy to tell by his body language that he seemed pleased with her, a realization that made her legs tremble and her face heat up like a marshmallow being roasted over a campfire. There were no more marshmallows in the stone age, but her legs felt like them anyways, especially when Tsukasa's voice was so close to her ear and his face was so close to her own and his other hand was pressed firmly against her back. 

"But that can wait, I have other plans and you're just the person for the job." he said. 

He was no romantic, but the way he was holding her told her enough for her to get the picture. 

"There's bad news and good news. Bad news is, half the people I wanted to revive got smashed into fine powder thanks to the idiots from the science kingdom." he said, starting out on the bad news because he always did that to get the bad news out of the way first so people wouldn't be left hanging in suspense, which was very nice of him, she thought. "The good news is, our current population is large enough that if anyone were to have children, there's almost no chance their distant descendants would end up as deformed inbred mutants. If some people were to go ahead and get started on that, there would be no time like the present." 

Oh. 

Oh holy shit. 

Well, it was now or never, she thought, not wanting to risk passing an opportunity like this up. 

"There really is no time like the present." she agreed, too nervous to form any original thoughts at the moment when Tsukasa let go of her face to run his hand through her hair, squeezing her ass with the other hand. 

Just as soon as she felt his hand rest there, though, a strange smell began to fill the air, something oddly familiar that Minami never thought she would ever smell again when she woke up in the stone age after the strangest night of her life. 

"What-what's that?" she asked, wrinkling her nose at the smell while Tsukasa looked around with an annoyed expression on his face.

Off in the distance, where neither of them could see, Senku Ishigami, who had survived his recent tumble with one of Tsukasa's soldiers mere hours earlier, managed to light an entire 100 lb. bag of his secret ace up his sleeve on fire right near the border of the Empire of Might, causing a chain reaction, that, if anyone bothered to write anything down anymore, would have ended up in every single history book with a target audience over the age of 12. 

"What a great feeling it is to be able to put my ace up my sleeve into action right now....heh....this couldn't be more perfect...." Senku laughed as the 100 lb. bag of weed he had spilled on the ground on purpose went up in smoke. "My crops...my revolution....this will be a day to remember....." 

Somewhere out of their line of sight, while Minami and Tsukasa lied passed out on the ground, Senku grinned like the Cheshire cat while the sky turned purple, then red, swirling and throbbing and pulsating and the trees wobbled, waving back and forth while the birds chirping sounded like trumpets and the sun burst into thick blue flames that enveloped the entire world in a cloud of dank smoke while Senku fell on his back, landing on a soft cloud that disappeared just before Senku's eyes turned into stars and he shot up into the sky like a rocket, raising his fist in the air in triumph. 

________

"And that's the story of how the great scientist Senku Ishigami started the ultimate revolution." a village elder told her young granddaughter, who was sitting in her lap, having recounted the story of the final battle between the Kingdom of Science and the Empire of Might that happened 2,459 years in the past during the second stone age, an era all but lost to the sands of time, to keep the tale alive and preserve their sacred knowledge for all future generations to come. 

"My Cabbages!" a strange man yelled somewhere off in the distance when someone hit his cart full of cabbages.

"Grandmother, what was that?" the woman's young granddaughter asked her.

"Nothing to worry about, it just gets crowded down there in the city, you know. People crash into each other if they don't watch where they're going, after all."

"Okay." the little girl replied, satisfied with the answer. "I guess I have to go to bed now that the story's over." she said, since it was late and her grandmother promised her only one story.

"Yes, but don't you worry, tomorrow's story is even better." the old woman promised after tucking her granddaughter into bed.

"I can't wait!" the little girl said. "Goodnight grandma."

"Goodnight and sleep tight. I'll see you in the morning." she wished the youngest member of her family, kissing her cheek before blowing out the candle and leaving the room.

**Author's Note:**

> The ending is based on this scene from Samurai Champloo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IMb-Cc5R7fk
> 
> The only explanation I can offer is that I fucking love Samurai Champloo and I had to insert a scene inspired by that scene into at least one fic.


End file.
